The present disclosure relates to editing and printing online images such as digital photographs made available through commercial web sites.
Many popular web sites allow users to upload photographs to share with friends and family. Originally the photo-sharing sites were standalone in that photo sharing was the only feature offered. Now photo sharing has been added to social networking sites so users do not have to leave the sites to share photographs. In both standalone and social network photo sharing, printing the photos has been an afterthought. The primary focus of such sites is to view photographs on a monitor without printing them. Thus while high-resolution images may be available for viewing, there is no capability to edit or enhance the images for printing.
Low-cost, high-quality consumer printers that allow users to easily print photographs at home are readily available. However, the traditional printing tools sometimes bundled with printers do not work well in a web environment. The workflow becomes quite tedious with the need to download the appropriate image file from a web site to a local disk, edit the file, and print the file locally. Each person wishing to print the same photograph from the web must repeat the same steps as there is currently no way to leverage the work of others.
One approach is to create yet another photo-sharing web site to address these problems. However, many users are already familiar with the photo sharing capabilities of the popular web sites they currently use, and so would be unlikely to switch to a different site.